Rich people have more time and more opportunity to gather information. They are more likely to become academic in nature. They are more likely to travel and to be exposed to different ideas. Thus, although they are not born more intelligent than the poor, they are in a situation which is more likely to develop their knowledge and bring forth their awareness of the opportunities in life.

Example: I was born in a middle class family from upper middle class roots.   In my family books and art and education and culture were very much emphasized. This certainly helped to steer me into book reading, into getting good marks in school, and into expecting to move up in life. When you expect to move up, you are more likely to.

I knew kids in school who were from much more working class families, families in which books were barely even thought of. They were more into physical stuff than I was. They were less into thinking and more into acting. This meant that they were better at sports, better at the rough and tumble of life, but not nearly as good as me at academics or writing or thinking. They were not growing up in a setting that encouraged gathering knowledge or thinking for its own sake, and I was.

And that is the classic divide between working class people and the bosses...or the artists...or the academics and intellectuals.

It starts early in life. If your kid is mainly into watching TV, playing video games, playing sports, socializing, and such...then your kid is being prepared for a working class existence...and will likely end up among the exploited. That has nothing to do with basic intelligence. Intelligence can be stifled or it can be encouraged. A life built on TV watching and playing Nintendo is quite likely to stifle intelligence and independent thought in most people.

"Rich" people are keenly aware that their background has provided them with a wider range of possibilities than most poorer people. If they are inclined to use those possibilities, then they can do a lot with them. Thus, they instinctively tend to feel "smarter" than poor people. They're not really smarter, they're just better prepared to use their intelligence.

The tragedy of the poor in any nation is mainly that they are not as aware of possibilities as they could be, had they grown up in a family that was not already locked into a working class lifestyle.

So...classes tend to perpetuate themselves.

The way to overcome this is to raise everyone to a basically good level of material existence, education, and medical care, as was attempted in Cuba after 1959...then take it from there. That necessitates some form of socialism. It is NOT going to happen in a purely free market system. Such a system acts to perpetuate the divide between rich and poor in order to maximize profit.

I will qualify the above by pointing out that, yes, there are some individuals who will break the pattern of their class...and move either up or down in class...but most people will basically repeat the established pattern they are most familiar with as youngsters.

Poor people may seem less intelligent to the rich...but they are simply shaped that way by what they are exposed to when they are quite young. As the twig is bent, so grows the tree.

A society that abandons its poor perpetuates its poverty.